Dialogue: 2
Monday, 28 November 2016
Politics is reductionist.
There are smart, good people who disagree with us.
--
Just one point…
Politics is reductionist.
This is a basic truth in any two-party democracy.
As a new Trump-era politics emerges, it bears remembering:
When we voted, we expressed ourselves with a binary choice.
No matter who we were, or what we thought,
All possibilities were reduced to two: Candidate A or Candidate B.
Suppose we reduce the infinite matrix to a 2x2 of intelligence and morality:
1. Voters may be either smart or stupid.
2. Voters may be either good or bad.
3. Voters may be any combination of 1 and 2.
4. So may candidates.
5. Any kind of voter may support any kind of candidate.
Which means that, regardless of your candidate:
Smart and good people voted against you.
And stupid and bad people voted with you.
Yet, such is our need to be ‘right’, that we have a cognitive bias:
We tend to assume our opponents are stupid or bad; probably both.
That doesn’t work anymore.
In post-election dialog, it would serve us well to assume the opposite.
There are smart, good people who disagree with us.
Engage them.
